US Aviation... 'Emergency Restrictions'

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it has begun gradually lifting air travel restrictions and resuming air navigation operations as systems return to normal, although further delays and cancellations are still expected across the United States. Last Friday, the FAA imposed a nationwide ground stop on all departures from U.S. airports following a communications outage, according to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Meanwhile, CNN reported that sources in the U.S. aviation sector said the FAA had informed airlines that the communications disruptions were caused by a malfunction in network routing equipment.

In a related development, U.S. President Donald Trump, in comments to Fox News during his first remarks on the flight suspension decision, said the problem did not appear to be caused by a cyberattack or artificial intelligence technologies. For his part, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin affirmed that the communications failure, which led to the postponement and cancellation of approximately 7,000 flights in the United States, did not resemble the events of September 11, clarifying that the incident involved a disruption in communications services and that the situation was entirely different. Speaking to Fox News, he said that U.S. authorities are considering the possibility of a cyberattack among the scenarios being investigated, but have not yet determined the cause of the outage, emphasizing that there were no indications that airports had been targeted by a deliberate cyberattack. He added that initial reports rule out a cyberattack as the cause of the glitch that disrupted air traffic at several U.S. airports.